For this year's Hallowe'en special John and Andy are joined by Backlisted's old fiends Andrew Male and Laura Varnam, following previous guest appearances on episodes dedicated to Beowulf (2020) and Daphne du Maurier's The Breaking Point (2019). Together we explore the work of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, specifically her ghost stories, tales of horror and accounts of psychological terror: Something in Disguise (1969), Odd Girl Out (1972), Mr Wrong (1975), Falling (1999), and We Are For the Dark (1951), the volume of strange stories she co-authored with previous Backlisted subject, Robert Aickman.

Also this week, Andy is gripped by Heike Gessler's Seasonal Associate (Semiotext(e)), the novelist's account of working in Amazon's warehouse in Leipzig, while John enjoys being unsettled by Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1980-1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson, the first in a series of 'Weird' anthologies published by Handheld Press.

NB. THIS EPISODE IS PACKED WITH SPOILERS and you may wish to read Something in Disguise before you listen to the podcast.

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Books mentioned:

Elizabeth Jane Howard - Something in Disguise; Falling; Mr Wrong; Odd Girl Out; The Long View; The Light Years
Elizabeth Jane Howard & Robert Aickman - We Are For the Dark
Elizabeth Jane Howard - Slipstream: A Memoir
Melissa Edmunson (ed) - Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890-1940
Melissa Edmunson (ed) - Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women 1890-1937
James Machin (ed) - British Weird: Selected Short Fiction 1893-1937
Heike Gessler - Seasonal Associate
Robert Aickman - The Wine Dark Sea
Kingsley Amis - The Green Man

Other links:

‘Black Sabbath’ by Nikos Achilles
Elizabeth Jane Howard interviews Evelyn Waugh, Monitor, 1964
Elizabeth Jane Howard discusses her adaptation of Something in Disguise and reads from the novel, 1982
Elizabeth Jane Howard and Frank Delaney review Margaret Atwood's novel Bodily Harm, 1982
Elizabeth Jane Howard interview with Sally Hardcastle, 1987
Elizabeth Jane Howard discusses Falling with Eleanor Wachtel, 2003
Elizabeth Jane Howard discusses Falling with James Naughtie, 2004
Martin Amis remembers his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, 2015
’Down by the Old Millstream’ by Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra